The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (13 page)

He wanted the risk, the exposure, the adrenalin—and the acclaim. Many people are made like that, and many are performers who exist only for their public. They are loved by the multitude; and often they turn out to be monsters in private.

That was emphatically not the case with Churchill. He not only took the wider public with him, he earned the devotion of those who were closest.

CHAPTER 8

A PROPER HUMAN HEART

I
t is not raining in London 94 per cent of the time. This, alas, is not one of those times. I am soaked. My blue suit is black and shiny with water and there is a sucking noise in my shoes as I get off my bike and enter the impressive Portland stone gateway.

All the way up the Romford Road I have cycled, through neighbourhoods whose languages and culture have changed a bit since Churchill came this way—past mosques and shops selling saris and kebabs and all the paraphernalia that goes with mobile phones. I am here at the burial-grounds of the City of London, at Wanstead.

‘I have come to find a grave,’ I tell them at the gate. They assure me I have plenty of choice. ‘Dame Anna Neagle’s buried here,’ says the chap in the peaked cap, helpfully. ‘And Sir Bobby Moore, and a couple of Jack the Ripper’s victims.’ And so are thousands of others.

As far as the eye can see there are the tombs and monuments of the Victorians in marble and porphyry and granite. The names have been in some cases eroded by time and sulphurous rain, and for a few minutes I worry that this is going to be one of those airport car park nightmares, and that I will spend hours pacing the well-kept paths, and getting wetter and wetter.

And then I see it—or a grave exactly matching the description. I squelch towards it over the grass, and yes, surely this is it: a simple cross on a square plinth, and before it a rectangle of freshly tilled earth and a couple of alliums. It occurs to me that someone has been looking after it, a bit. I lean down to read the name at the foot of the plinth.

Winston Spencer Churchill, it says.

Except, of course, that it isn’t Churchill’s body mouldering underneath. He’s somewhere else—at Bladon in Oxfordshire. This is the resting-place of someone he is said to have loved very dearly indeed.

I stand for a moment. It has stopped raining, and drops are falling slowly from the chestnut trees above. I brood on the person below, and her passionate relationship with Churchill; and Churchill’s feelings for her.

I am here on a mission, to try to answer the important question about any famous person; the key question, in fact, about any human being. In Churchill’s case the question is critical, because there are so many people (and by no means just politicians or journalists) who have secretly or openly regarded his life as the pattern, example, inspiration and role model for their own. That is why we need to dig into his essential nature.

One night I was explaining Churchill to some friends: his bravery, his genius for language, his indomitable energy. ‘Yes,’ said one friend, leaning back in a languid way, ‘but what do you think he was like to meet? I mean: was he a nice guy?’

Well, I can tell you about what he was like to meet—because a few months previously I had virtually met him.

—

A
S SOON AS
I walked into the Churchill archive in Cambridge I bit back a yelp of alarm. Allen Packwood, the director, was there to greet
me, and he seemed to be holding out an artificial hand. Manners, of course, got the better of me, and I shook his prosthesis; and then I realised that it was made of bronze.

‘You have just shaken the hand of Winston Churchill,’ he said. I examined the cast, and was struck by how dainty it seemed. The fingers were shapely, but not long or large. This was the hand that so fiercely swung polo mallets until the age of fifty-two, that fired Mausers, that steered seaplanes, that pulled apart the barbed wire of no man’s land.

This was the hand that signed the paper that felled the city, five sovereign fingers that put a regime to death. ‘He had small hands,’ confirmed Allen. I would say that Churchill’s hands were about the same size as his mother’s—and if you doubt me, have a look at the cast of Jennie’s hand in a glass case at Chartwell. Churchill’s hands look rather finer.

‘And they were very pink,’ said Allen, ‘because he liked baths so much.’ It wasn’t just that his hands were small. We all know that statue in Parliament Square, of Churchill hunched forward with his stick. You have the impression of a physical colossus with raking arms and bison-like shoulders. In fact Martin Gilbert says he was 5 foot 8, while other authorities—William Manchester, Norman Rose—say he was at best 5 foot 6½.

There are some photos of him walking across Horse Guards—leg swinging in his butler’s trousers—and I swear there is a touch of the Tom Cruise about the heel. When I told Andrew Roberts, that most eminent Churchillian, of Churchill’s vertical sub-eminence, he was not entirely surprised. ‘I knew we would have seen eye to eye!’ he exclaimed.

Who else was 5 foot 6 or under? Some of the biggest tyrants and creeps in world history: Augustus (5 foot 6), Napoleon (ditto),
Mussolini (ditto), Stalin (teensy at 5 foot 4). Hitler was only 5 foot 8. All these characters have been associated with the over-compensatory aggression that is sometimes referred to as ‘short man’ syndrome; and there is some evidence, at least on the face of it, that Churchill suffered from this, too.

He could certainly be—how shall we say—short with people. Roberts has daringly observed that, of the two men, Hitler was probably kinder and more solicitous to his staff. Churchill would not only keep them up all night while he dictated; he could get quite testy if they got things wrong. ‘
Where were you educated?’ he would shout. ‘Why don’t you read a book?’

Mind you, he didn’t only shout at underlings. We have a description of him from the 1920s, marching about Baldwin’s room during a dispute with Neville Chamberlain, ranting and shaking his fist. Let us therefore now assemble the whole case against his character. Let us follow the example of the modern showboating district attorney, and create a kind of insinuating hodge-podge or collage of all the evidence—trivial or otherwise.

The case against him is that he was not only the greatest man of modern British history but also, in his own sweet way, something of a tosser in his treatment of others.

Here are the things that his enemies (and sometimes his friends) would say, and the reasons they gave for saying them. They said that he behaved like a spoilt child; and we must accept that he was used to getting his way—and from a very early age. Read the emetic and manipulative letters he writes to his mother at the age of twelve, begging her to let him go to see Buffalo Bill.

. . .
I want to see Buffalo Bill and the Play as you promised me. I shall be very disappointed, disappointed is not the word I
shall be miserable, after you have promised me, and all, I shall never trust your promises again. But I know Mummy loves her Winny too much for that . . .

And so on in a similar vein. This was the first of three such letters about Buffalo Bill, and they show not just his iron determination but his sense of entitlement. By the age of fourteen he had already persuaded one of his schoolchums—one Milbanke—to take down his dictation while he reclined in the bath. Poor Milbanke was later to die at Gallipoli, but he was the first of many bathside amanuenses.

As Churchill’s sister-in-law Lady Gwendoline ‘Goonie’ Bertie put it, he had a tendency to ‘
orientalism’, and was never so happy as when a servant was pulling on his socks. He may have shown outstanding bravery when he went to the trenches, but his luxuries were astonishing.

To the front with Churchill went a private bathtub, large towels, a hot-water bottle, food boxes from Fortnum and Mason, large slabs of corned beef, Stilton cheeses, cream, ham, sardines, dried fruit, and a big steak pie, not to mention peach brandy and other liqueurs. ‘You must remember,’ his wife once told his doctor, ‘he knows nothing of the lives of ordinary people.’

He never took a bus in his life, she said, and had only once been on the London Underground; one of the few modern technical marvels that defeated him. He got lost, and had to be helped to find his way out.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, there are those who will tell you that he was not only irascible, and spoilt, but that he was a bully. Remember the murky affair at Sandhurst, and the way the young officers all ganged up on the subaltern called Bruce—so that he was effectively forced to leave.

There is no sign that Churchill did the Christian thing, and tried to reassure the anxious soldier. On the contrary, there were those who said Churchill was the positive ringleader of the bullying.

What is worse than being a spoilt and irascible bully? How about the general charge that he didn’t really have real friends—only people he ‘used’ for his own advancement. In the recent docudrama
The Gathering Storm
we see the way a young Foreign Office man called Ralph Wigram was persuaded to go down to Chartwell and brief Churchill about the reality of German rearmament—information that Churchill was to use ruthlessly and effectively in his attacks on Stanley Baldwin’s government.

In taking these documents from Whitehall, Wigram put his career on the line. He was eventually suspected of leaking to Churchill, and sidelined within the Foreign Office. In the telly drama we see the toll this takes on his family, the threats from his superiors; and then he appears to commit suicide. Poor fellow—the drama seems to say—sacrificed for the sake of Churchill’s ambition.

Or what about the charge of ratting on his friends—in many people’s eyes the ultimate crime? When he made his famous escape from the Boer jail in Pretoria, there were two men who were meant to go with him, called Haldane and Brockie. The suggestion was that Churchill had welched on the agreement, and scooted off by himself.

An aggressive, spoilt, bullying double-crosser: what else can we add? The final charge is just that he was too self-interested, too wrapped up in himself to be properly human.

Suppose you were a young woman ushered into a dinner party, and found yourself sitting next to the great man. The allegation against Churchill was that he was really fascinated by only one subject, and that was Winston Churchill. As Margot Asquith put it: ‘
Winston, like all really self-centred people, ends up by boring people.’ So that is the case for the prosecution, Your Honour.

Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill is accused of being a spoilt, bullying, double-crossing, self-centred bore, and a bit of an all-round brute. Let’s now call the counsel for the defence—a role I am also happy, for the sake of argument, to play myself.

Take first the assertion that he was a tyrant to his staff. Yes, of course he pushed people hard, and it is certainly true that poor Alan Brooke, his military adviser, was driven more or less round the bend in the war—silently snapping pencils in an effort to control his feelings. But think of the stress that Churchill was under, coordinating a war that we showed no sign of winning.

It was not as if Churchill was always unaware of his behaviour. ‘
I wonder that a great many of my colleagues are on speaking terms with me,’ he said. He would sometimes break out of his marathon dictation sessions, realise that his assistants were getting cold, and make the fire himself.

On the death of Violet Pearman, one of his most faithful and put-upon secretaries, he made sure that her daughter got money from his own pocket. He sent money to the wife of his doctor, when she got into difficulties. When a friend of his was injured in the Boer War, Churchill rolled up his sleeve and provided a skin graft himself—without anaesthetic.

Was this the action of a selfish tosser? ‘
When you first meet Winston you see all his faults,’ said Churchill’s early love interest Pamela Plowden. ‘You spend the rest of your life discovering his virtues.’

Let us turn now to the allegations of his luxury amid the squalor of the trenches—the suggestion that he somehow lorded it over the rest of the battalion. What nonsense.

It is true that there was a certain amount of dudgeon when he arrived at his command in January 1916. Who was this politician? grumbled the Scots Fusiliers. Why couldn’t he find another battalion? Churchill began by launching a savage rhetorical attack on the
louse,
Pulex europaeus
. The men listened, amazed, to his disquisition on the origins of the insect, its nature, its habitat, its importance in wars ancient and modern.

He then organised for unused brewery vats to be brought to Moolenacker for a collective delousing—and it worked. Respect for Churchill climbed. He reduced punishments. He dished out his luxuries to all who visited the mess. Read
With Winston Churchill at the Front
, published by ‘Captain X’ (in reality Andrew Dewar-Gibb), who saw what happened with his own eyes.

If a man left that mess ‘
without a large cigar lighting up his mollified countenance, that was because he was a non-smoker and through no fault of Col Churchill’. He did the same with the peach and apricot brandy. Yes, there was a bath—described by Dewar-Gibb as a kind of long soap dish; but plenty of other people used it. Churchill’s trenches reign was somehow both democratic and domestic, says Dewar-Gibb, and he paints a picture of the battalion at rest: Churchill sitting tilted in a rickety chair, reading a pocket Shakespeare and beating time to the gramophone, with other officers lounging about or reading in the sun.

Remember that these men are taking awful casualties, with shells (German and sometimes British) exploding around them virtually every day. It was Churchill who got them singing music-hall songs—some of them a bit ‘robust’ for Captain Dewar-Gibb’s taste. It was Churchill who urged them to laugh when they could. One young officer, Jock MacDavid, later recalled that ‘
After a very brief period he had accelerated the morale of officers and men to an almost unbelievable degree. It was sheer personality.’

I put it to you that this is the conduct of a leader, a man with a proper care for the welfare of his charges. This is not the behaviour of a bully; and we can likewise dismiss the old canard about the treatment of poor Bruce the subaltern at Sandhurst.